It started out as a sweeping proposal to open coastal waters all around the United States to exploration and exploitation for oil. No doubt in just that order. Only now this administration is having second and much better thoughts after the people and politicians of Florida voiced what sounded like a near-unanimous reaction to this administration’s not-so-bright idea.

BOUQUETS >> To Friendship Baptist Church, 2160 Reeves Ave. in Lorain, for adopting Washington Elementary School so it can help families who have arrived in the city from hurricane-battered Puerto Rico.

We the People’s fickle attention span was captured the other day by a dramatic fall in stock indices — the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, the NASDAQ composite, the Russell 2000 index of smaller companies.

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names. But what used to go by the honest, simple name of vocational education is now being marketed under the upscale brand of Career Education in keeping with the recurrent rage for rebranding products.

It didn’t seem to fit in President Trump’s State of the Union address, perhaps something tossed in at the last minute, like a garnish. But there it was: “As America regains its strength, opportunity must be extended to all citizens.

The Vietnam War was the bloodiest American conflict since World War II. Between President Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of the war starting in 1964 and Richard Nixon’s exit in 1973, almost 60,000 American servicemen and countless Vietnamese were killed in action.

Partisans tend to read, watch and listen only, or mostly, to information and opinions that reinforce their beliefs. If information surfaces that counters those beliefs, it is usually disparaged, excused or ignored.

Recently, I offered a 10-point plan to re-image Lorain’s northernmost historic urban hub, notable as Erie Avenue, south on Route 57 (known as Broadway in the city of Lorain) to the 900-1000 block, and Reid Avenue to Black River Lane.

President Trump’s first State of the Union address set a new standard. For himself. If he lives up to that standard in future speeches, he may go far in changing his image from a blustering, ad-libbing “entertainer,” to someone who looks and sounds, shall I say it, more “presidential.

WASHINGTON >> In vivid detail, President Donald Trump told stories of American heroism, heartbreak and tragedy in his emotionally charged first State of the Union. What he didn’t detail were solutions to the crises ahead.

BOUQUETS >> To the Cleveland Indians for announcing Jan. 29 it is dropping the Chief Wahoo logo from its uniforms next year, bowing to decades of complaints that the grinning, red-faced caricature used in one version or another since 1947 is racist.

That verse, written by Paul the Apostle, is one of the most difficult for modern evangelicals to fully accept. It was written at a time when the Roman authorities were bad dudes. They actively discriminated against the early Christians, murdering some, imprisoning others, including Paul, who was among their most ardent persecutors before his conversion.

The Trump administration is now moving to put some teeth on its promise to punish “unfair” trade from China and other countries. This week it imposed punitive tariffs on Chinese and South Korean manufacturers of washing machines and solar panels.

The Democrats’ crusade to force a government shutdown in order to win permanent protections for “Dreamers” went down in flames Monday. The price extracted by Democrats was meager compared to what they wanted.

RAMALLAH, West Bank >> There seems to be no going back for Mahmoud Abbas after the Palestinian leader cursed and ridiculed President Donald Trump and his aides in a pugnacious speech — a very public break with the 82-year-old’s long-standing efforts to cultivate Washington’s goodwill as the sole pathway to Palestinian statehood.

How little, if anything, this country seems to have learned from the environmental, economic and just plain human disaster that was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill some seven years ago. For now the regulators have become deregulators in the spirit of these Trumpian times.

It’s alarming to see statistics showing children who grow up in poverty in Lorain County, and more specifically in the cities of Lorain and Elyria, have a small chance of seeing a better life economically as adults.

Some of us can think of far worse accusations to make against a president of the United States than what Donald Trump is now being accused of by his oh-so-reflexive critics. Namely, that he changes his mind — and his policies — when they no longer seem to be working.

The ancient Greeks referred to the dramatic moment in some of their plays as “deus ex machina,” the god from the machine. The term, introduced by the Greek tragedian Aeschylus, has, according to definition, “evolved to mean a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved by the inspired and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability or object.

That’s the first time the phrase “inside the Beltway” — meaning, in this instance, the physical realm within the I-495 ring road that surrounds Washington, D.C. — appeared in the Washington Post, the official Beltway paper.

A worried dictator sings a worried song, even if he feels obliged to deliver its refrain with a fired gun in place. For even Hassan Rouhani, leader for now of Iran’s theocracy, seems to have felt obliged to note publicly that the natives have grown restless.

BOUQUETS >> To Lorain County Community College for hosting the Veterans’ Orientation and Registration Fair which supplied military veterans with information they need to succeed after leaving the service.

Having lost an election they thought they would win and unable to get over it; having been staggeringly wrong about their predictions that a Trump presidency would be the end of global economies; now putting faith in a special counsel to bring down the president with evidence that looks increasingly dubious, the left has taken refuge in the only shelter available to them: the president is off his rocker, mad, crazy, unstable and therefore the 25th Amendment must be invoked and Trump removed from office.